Dreaming in pictures

Endless Poetry, the new film from Alejandro Jodorowsky, proves that the 87-year-old’s creative energy knows no bounds.

The Chilean-born director hadn’t made a feature film in 23 years before returning with The Dance of Reality in 2013. Now four years later he’s made the follow-up, which continues where Dance left off in Jodorowsky’s mashup of autobiography and imagination.

The film, which plays 7 p.m. at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art on Oct. 18, begins after young Alejandro (Jeremias Herskovits) has moved from the small Chilean village of Tocopilla to the capital city, Santiago. He discovers a book of poetry by Federico García Lorca and soon realizes that he must become an artist, despite his father’s insistence that he become a doctor.

Jodorowsky’s cult classics El Topo (1970) and The Holy Mountain (1973) were notorious for their brutally violent and profane imagery. In The Dance of Reality, however, Jodorowsky is unexpectedly tender as he revisits his childhood in Tocopilla. With Endless Poetry, that tenderness turns bittersweet as young Jodorowsky breaks ties with his family to pursue his vocation.

In the opening scene, Jodorowsky appears in the middle of modern-day Matucana Street in Santiago, where its storefronts are covered in graffiti. He explains that it was once the main road of the working class. The street then fills with activity, as figures cloaked in black cover the storefronts with images of the same street from Jodorowsky’s childhood, as if stagehands were performing a scene change. The rest of the film alternates between memory and creation, and by the end, Jodorowsky eliminates the distinction between the two.

Jodorowsky’s shift away from shock broadens the emotional palette of Endless Poetry — and, most likely, widens its appeal. But this film also shows that Jodorowsky, one of cinema’s great enfants terribles, has lost a bit of his edge. His affection for the artist community of his youth plays out like a mild piece of experimental theater. His interactions with noted Chilean writers of the day, including Stella Díaz Varín, Nicanor Parra and Enrique Lihn (or Jodorowsky’s versions of them) fail to provide much insight into the artists or their art. And until late in the film, the conflict between practical-businessman-father and hedonistic-artist-son remains one-note and cliched.

Despite this lack of edginess, Jodorowsky still conjures vivid images that dance with joy. Working with famed cinematographer Christopher Doyle, Jodorowsky’s canvas explodes with color, especially in a parade populated with costumed devils and skeletons. And there are moments that revive Jodorowsky’s idiosyncratic audacity. The elder Jodorowsky takes a thief out of his shop into the street and strips her naked in front of a crowd of masked observers. And there’s a sex scene with a menstruating little person.

Jodorowsky’s sons, Brontis and Adan, portray the artist’s father and the young adult Alejandro. This casting choice adds emotional resonance to moments when Jodorowsky appears in the film to talk to his younger self. And when his own sons recreate the final time Jodorowsky would ever see his father, Endless Poetry echoes a sentiment from William Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”